Last time I have written about the portal dilemma. Read this post in continuation of that one only. Last time I was evaluating some open source portal servers. What I concluded that open source portal servers are not as matured as their commercial counter parts. Open Source portal products has long way to go. But it does not mean that commercial portal servers can serve all purpose. For example commercial portal servers comes with lots of out of box portlets, content publishing solution, security solutions, collaboration solutions etc. These are either not available with open source portal servers or partially available. But the commercial portal servers are also not without problems. As always, the problem with commercial portal server is their cost. You can say that what is new in that. After all "commercial" products will be costlier than Open Source portal servers. No, the point I want to make is those are too much costly and not yet affordable one. The average price of commercial portal server is $ 50,000. Add to it the customization cost. On an average (among our clients) the customization cost is 2 to 3 times of portal cost. Compare it with some other server say application server. There are commercial enterprise caliber application servers available at much lower price, even free of cost. As you see the difference is too much. Portal servers are a long way to go to get acceptability everywhere. As a company we see a requirement of java portals at many places. Portals can be useful, in some way or other, to nearly all of our clients. But the problem is cost. Not every client can afford that much of cost. So let us hope for the availability of cost effective feature rich portals. Oh I am feeling myself richer ….. J PS: Managibility.com has conducted a poll getting opening on The Best Java Open Source Portal Server. Please go and cast your vote.